NEW YORK  Two siblings already are top 10 shows. CBS chairman Leslie Moonves is confidently predicting the third will be the biggest hit of next season, a scenario that spurred movie star Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump, Apollo 13) to take on his first TV series.

Melina Kanakaredes and Gary Sinise head up the Big Apple-flavored CSI spinoff.

CBS

So the odds are good, barring some kind of criminal curse, that the sturdy CSI franchise — the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, set in Las Vegas, and CSI: Miami — will threepeat this fall with a new edition set in the Big Apple.

"There's a lot of pressure not to (mess) this one up," says creator Anthony Zuiker, who will oversee day-to-day production on CSI: New York, his first such role.

Forensics fans will get a taste of the series next Monday (10 p.m. ET/PT), when Sinise and co-star Melina Kanakaredes (Providence) appear in an episode that will spin off CSI: New York from CSI: Miami; the two meet up with Miami's David Caruso when he travels north on a case involving a dead rich couple.

"I thought it had a real good chance of being successful, and I had never thought about doing a series before," says Sinise, who agreed after a persuasive three-hour dinner with an excitable Zuiker. "I have kids, it'd be nice to be at home with them and have a steady job for a while instead of a ... nomadic, erratic movie schedule."

Like the other CSIs, New York will focus on a male-female team of forensics investigators: Mac Taylor (Sinise) and Stella Bonasera (Kanakaredes). But it will delve much more deeply into the personal lives of its characters, unlike its forerunners and the Law & Order series.

Although their histories could change, Stella's back story is that she became a crime-scene investigator to assuage the sins of her shady father: After his mysterious death, she stepped up as the oldest child to take care of the family.

Mac, a military officer-turned-cop, lost his wife in the World Trade Center attack, Sinise says.

"We're going to attempt to open the characters up some to make it fresh and different, but at heart you'll know it's a forensics show," says Zuiker, huddled in front of a college building — standing in for a police precinct — on a Thursday morning last month. Sinise, Kanakaredes and Caruso, surrounded by a scrum of fake news reporters and camera crews, exited the building in an endless series of retakes.

(Like the other CSIs, New York will be shot mostly at a Los Angeles studio, with occasional trips to its namesake city.)

"Part of the appeal to me was doing something different," says Kanakaredes, who appeared on NYPD Blue for a year but is best known for NBC's sentimental family drama Providence. "There's no sure thing anywhere. (But) New York is going to add a whole new energy, a whole new spin, a whole new feel. You look at somebody in New York and you know who they are, their energy, their presence; there's no facade."

On a more practical level, producers say forensics teams in Las Vegas, Miami and New York are different: In Vegas they're civilians. In Miami, they're officers who can carry weapons, but in New York, they also have to learn the ropes as detectives.

"Some of these people are really nerdy scientific people," Kanakaredes says. "The remarkable thing about this whole franchise is that they made science sexy."